Ninox

Ninox is built by Ninox Software GmbH, headquartered in Berlin, founded in 2014 and rebranded in 2021 after running Germany's fastest crowdfunding campaign the year before. It sits between a no-code database and a full application platform: relational tables and forms come first, but a proprietary scripting language underneath lets a non-developer add calculated fields, triggers and small pieces of real logic that a plain database tool can't express.

Pricing is published in full: a genuine free tier for up to 5 users and 5,000 records, then Team at €25 a user a month and Business at €40 a user a month, both billed annually, with Enterprise reserved for organisations that want a private-cloud deployment. That transparency, combined with German hosting, is a large part of why the vendor reports over 5,000 customers concentrated in the German and Swiss Mittelstand.

The honest limitation is maintainability: Ninox's scripting language is proprietary and thinly documented outside German, so an application built by one person becomes hard for a successor to read, and performance is known to degrade once tables grow large. It is the right tool for a small back-office team building its own departmental database with some logic attached — not for an application meant to scale past a few hundred thousand records or outlive its original builder.

What Ninox does well

• Berlin-headquartered (Ninox Software GmbH), with a genuine free tier for up to 5 users, not just a trial
• Published, transparent per-user pricing on every paid tier, including Enterprise’s private-cloud option
• A built-in scripting language lets a non-developer add real logic — formulas, triggers, automations — beyond a plain database
• Widely adopted among German and Swiss Mittelstand back offices, per the vendor's own customer figures (5,000+ customers stated)

Where Ninox falls short

• The scripting language is proprietary to Ninox and sparsely documented in English, so applications are hard for anyone but their original author to maintain
• Performance is reported to degrade on very large tables — this is a tool for departmental applications, not enterprise-scale data volumes
• No third-party compliance certification (SOC 2, ISO 27001) stated on the pages checked
• Free tier is capped tightly (100MB, 5,000 records), useful for evaluation rather than production use

Standout feature. A proprietary scripting language sits underneath the visual builder, so a Ninox application can express real business logic — calculated fields, triggers, custom functions — that a pure no-code database can't, while staying far lighter than an enterprise platform like Mendix.